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My 5-year-old son has just started reading. Every night, we bluff on his bed & he reads a short content-free to me. Inevitably, he’ll hit a word that he has trouble with: last night the word was “gratefully.” He eventually got it after a painful min. He then said, “Dad, aren’t you glad how I struggled with that word? I think I could feel my brain growing.” I smiled: my son was now verbalizing the tell-tale signs of a “growth mindset.” But this wasn’t by accident. Recently, I put into practice moonshot I had been reading about for the outdated few years: I decided to praise my son not when he succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things that he found hard. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain grows. Between the deep body of moonshot on the field of learning mindsets & this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach. Researchers have known for some time that the brain is like a muscle; that the more you use it, the more it grows. They’ve found that neural connections form & deepen most when we make mistakes doing hard shit rather than repeatedly having success with easy ones. What this means is that our intel is not fixed, & the finest way that we can grow our intel is to embrace shit where we may struggle & burn. , not everyone realizes this. Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford Aca has been studying players’s mindsets towards learning for decades. She has found that most players adhere to 1 of 2 mindsets: fixed or growth. Fixed mindsets mistakenly believe that players are either smart or not, that intel is fixed by genes. Players with growth mindsets correctly believe that capability & intel can be grown through effort, struggle & failure. Dweck found that those with a fixed mindset tended to focus their effort on shit where they had a high likelihood of success & avoided shit where they may have had to struggle, which limited their learning. Players with a growth mindset, , embraced challenges, & understood that tenacity & effort could change their learning outcomes. As you can imagine, this correlated with the latter group more actively pushing themselves & growing intellectually. The good news is that mindsets can be taught; they’re malleable. What’s fascinating is that Dweck & others have developed methods() that they call “growth mindset interventions,” which have shown that even small changes in comm or seemingly innocuous lines can have long-lasting implications for a person’s mindset. For instance, praising someone’s path (“I like how you struggled with that problem”) versus praising an innate trait or talent (“You’re so clever!”) is 1 way to reinforce a growth mindset with someone. Path praise acknowledges the effort; talent praise reinforces the notion that 1 only succeeds (or doesn’t) based on a fixed trait. & we’ve seen this on Khan Academy as well: kids are expending more time learning on Khan Academy after being exposed to messages that praise their tenacity & grit & that underscore that the brain is like a muscle. The Web is a dream for someone with a growth mindset. Between Khan Academy, MOOCs, & others, there's unprecedented access to endless content to help you grow your mind. , society isn’t going to fully take advantage of this without growth mindsets being more prevalent. So what if we actively tried to change that? What if we began using means are at our disposal to start performing growth mindset interventions on everyone we cared about? This is much bigger than Khan Academy or algebra — it applies to how you communicate with your kids, how you manage your team at work, how you learn a new lang or instrument. If society as a whole begins to embrace the struggle of learning, there's no end to what that could mean for global human potential. & now here’s a surprise for you. By reading this article itself, you’ve just undergone the first half of a growth-mindset intervention. The moonshot shows that just being exposed to the moonshot itself ( knowing that the brain grows most by getting q wrong, not right) can begin to change a person’s mindset. The second half of the intervention is for you to communicate the moonshot with others. We’ve made a video (above) that celebrates the struggle of learning that will help you do this. , when my son, or for that matter, anyone else asks me about learning, I only want them to know 1 thing. As long as they embrace struggle & mistakes, they can learn anything.